Vox Populi: How are you using Mail Tags?

I open the floor to all of you on a question of particular personal interest to me: How are you using Mail Tags?

While my uses of it to date have been helpful, I keep getting the feeling I'm not getting all that I can out of it -- especially since the ability to associate Projects, Priorities, etc. to a message could make for some really enticing Smart Folders.

I wonder if my question is ultimately more taxonomic in nature -- ultimately more about Spotlight in general or Tags in very very general: When tagging items on your Mac, what kind of '-onomy' are you using? How strictly do you enforce your vocabulary? What are the best practices for someone who's new to this?

Confidential to Mr. Thomas Vander Wal: if you turn up here and school me a bit on this, I’ll totally buy you a Coke. If you write a guest post on it, I’ll buy you a beefsteak and two cocktails. Seriously. Steak.

I know this is a little off-topic, but in some sense, the more general requirement is how do you integrate/link your emails into your GTD system. Tagging is one approach. Another is to link to your emails via URLs, or some other linking system.

I wish there was an easy way to have a URL to uniquely identify an email message. I use TiddlyWiki to maintain my GTD data, and occassionally, it is nice to refer to a specific email message by a URL.

At the moment, all my business emails are on an IMAP server, so I have installed Squirrel Mail, which gives me the unique URL -> email reference, so in TiddlyWiki, I can click on a link to see the associated email of interest, that may be relevant for a project or task.

However, other systems such as gmail, from what I can tell, don't give this to you easily, if at all. And as for other email clients... I suspect it won't be easy.

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